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Month: August 2014

So we have this community called hobbygamedev on reddit. I also joined, hoping to meet fellow enthusiastic game developers and get some motivation. On April, Chris DeLeon started a warm-up round named April Collaboration. The idea is to start and deliver a game in one month with 0 budget. The aim was to stretch our game-making muscles and experiment on collaborating with volunteers.

Anyway, I accepted the challenge to lead a project, along with some more people and began working on the game. We aimed to make a simple concentration game. My personal target was to make all the coding and leave all the asset creation to the other contributors. Man, it worked! And here is fastest game I produced and readily playable in your favourite browser thanks to the super-duper HTML5+Javascript+impactjs.

Then something interesting happened. After posted a mini post-mortem in reddit, I got some comments and this one really got me thinking:

Excellent! My wife heard me playing this, came over and kicked me off the computer to have a go. She loves it.

This also happened with my wife and also my daughter. At least they played the game, commented that some sounds are way too high, graphics etc.., but basically said, well this is not garbage :>

So I thought, if I could make a game in 1 month, how well can I polish it in some more months. At that time, I had just finished my first iOS title and the sales were, how can I say, down-to-earth and frankly I wasn’t in the mood to start another project of that size.

Well, fast forward 3 months and here I have a concentration game with an attitude. I mean, the basic mechanics (and even most of the code) is exactly the same as the first one and also similar to what you can find in the internet by dozens. But adding the levels and difficulty increase, etc.. this is something you can play – I dare say- like Candy Crush Saga.

This post will continue, but if you want to play the alpha version, it’s here. I wasn’t going to post the game until I finished it completely, primarily for the reasons that someone can copy it before I hit the market and etc. But anyway, I don’t think that’ll happen. At the very least, this fear can provide some additional motivation to finish it earlier then anybody else 🙂

I’ll really appreciate any comments, here or in reddit. I’ll post part II in a while. Thanks for reading.